Birthday Letters - British Library

https://www.bl.uk/works/birthday-letters

Birthday Letters, a collection of 88 poems by the British poet Ted Hughes, was published to public and critical acclaim in 1998. Their subject is Hughes’s relationship with the American poet Sylvia Plath, to whom he was married from 1956 until her death in 1963. Written over a period of 25 years, all the poems, except two, are addressed directly to Plath. They cross-layer time, memory and perspective, exploring events such as their first meeting (‘St Botolph’s) or the impact of Plath’s death by suicide in 1963 (‘Life after Death’). Many poems are shaped by Hughes’s access to Plath’s diaries (‘Trophies’, ‘The Rag Rug’), while others appear to respond to subjects found within Plath’s own poetry (‘The Bee God’). The overall effect is to movingly renew the dialogue upon which their relationship had originally been based. At the same time, it is important to remember that the collection is a poetic retelling of events rather than a factual account.
The relationship had been tortuously scrutinised in the public eye since Plath’s death. Hughes himself had generally kept what his successor as Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, called ‘a bristling badger-silence which seemed dignified to some, reprehensible to others, and fascinating to everyone’. The publication of Birthday Letters therefore came as something of a surprise to the reading public, though eight of the poems – ‘Chaucer’, ‘You Hated Spain’, ‘The Earthenware Head’, ‘The Tender Place’, ‘Black Coat’, ‘Being Christlike’, ‘The God’, and ‘The Dogs are Eating Your Mother’ – had already been published in Hughes’s 1995 New Selected Poems.
Hughes died nine months after the publication of Birthday Letters. When it was awarded the Whitbread Prize, his daughter Frieda read out a letter to a friend in which Hughes had explained,
I had always just thought them unpublishably raw and unguarded, simply too vulnerable. But then I just could not endure being blocked any longer … If only I had done the equivalent 30 years ago, then I might have had a more fruitful career – certainly a freer psychological life.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sylvia Plath

Image
Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath © Bettmann/CORBIS The American writer Sylvia Plath was born in Massachusetts in 1932. Her father, a Prussian immigrant who had been an expert in bees and teacher of German at Boston University, died of undiagnosed diabetes when she was eight. She was a prodigiously hard-working school child, publishing her first poem also at the age of eight. She had written 50 short stories by the time she won a prize scholarship to Smith College, where she excelled academically and published poems and journalistic pieces. She spent the summer of 1953 in New York, having been awarded a guest editorship at the magazine  Mademoiselle , but suffered a breakdown on her return home and attempted suicide shortly afterwards. After undergoing treatment, she returned to Smith in 1954, graduated  summa cum laude  in June 1955, and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge between 1955 and 57. There, she met the poet  Ted Hughes , wh
Read more

Requiem for the Croppies - Seamus Heaney

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley... No kitchens on the run, no striking camp... We moved quick and sudden in our own country. The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp. A people hardly marching... on the hike... We found new tactics happening each day: We'd cut through reins and rider with the pike And stampede cattle into infantry, Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown. Until... on Vinegar Hill... the final conclave. Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon. The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave. They buried us without shroud or coffin And in August... the barley grew up out of our grave.
Read more

Platform One

Image
Holiday squeals, as if all were scrambling for their lives, Panting aboard the “Cornish Riviera”. Then overflow of relief and luggage and children, Then duckling to smile out as the station moves. Out there on the platform, under the rain, Under his rain-cape, helmet and full pack, Somebody, head bowed reading something, Doesn’t know he’s missing his train. He’s completely buried in that book. He’s forgotten utterly where he is. He’s forgotten Paddington, forgotten Timetables, forgotten the long, rocking Cradle of a journey into the golden West, The coach’s soft wingbeat – as light And straight as a dove’s flight. Like a graveyard statue sentry cast In blackened bronze. Is he reading poems? A letter? The burial service? The raindrops Beaded along his helmet rim are bronze. The words on his page are bronze. Their meanings bronze. Sunk in his bronze world he stands, enchanted. His bronze mind is deep among the dead. Sunk so deep among the
Read more